In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a time when I u...

ScaleMP™, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end
computing, today announced the newest version of its server
virtualization for aggregation software platform, vSMP Foundation™ 5.
This latest release from ScaleMP includes new technologies that broaden
the technical and business environments that can benefit from vSMP
Foundation.

“The new functionality in vSMP Foundation 5 will help ScaleMP broaden
its reach into more end users, including rapidly expanding application
areas like Big Data,” said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research.
“For analytics and MapReduce types of applications, users want ease of
programming and management over a scalable memory or I/O space, and vSMP
Foundation gives them an opportunity to have that.”

New features available with vSMP Foundation 5

Extended hardware options:

Intel True Scale HCAs support - vSMP Foundation 5 supports the
latest Intel True Scale Fabric 7300 Series Host Adapter as a system
interconnect. By supporting this new Intel InfiniBand adapter, vSMP
Foundation allows for cost-effective, high-performance VMs designed
from the ground up for the Intel ecosystem.

10GigE network adapters - vSMP Foundation 5 is providing
customers with more choice when it comes to designing their 10GigE
fabrics. This new version supports Emulex OneConnect 10GbE network
adapters and the Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM578x0 family of network
controllers.

Processor support - vSMP Foundation 5 expands processor
support for the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-4600 family and the AMD
Opteron™ 6300 series – providing support for the latest generation of
processors for the most demanding workloads.

Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor support - vSMP Foundation 5 supports
the recently announced Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, Intel’s latest
entry for high performance computing in two modes:
processor-virtualized mode and coprocessor-aggregated mode. Under the
processor-virtualized mode, vSMP Foundation virtualizes the entire
platform, both the host CPU and memory with the Intel Xeon Phi
coprocessor cores and memory. Thus, any application that runs on an
existing IA host system will seamlessly run on the Intel Xeon Phi
coprocessor based system. Applications which are scalable will see an
immediate performance gain due to having over 50 cores available
running in one instance of the operating system. With a
coprocessor-aggregated mode, vSMP Foundation 5 supports traditional
coprocessor operational mode allowing for offloading and native
execution when aggregating multiple servers to a larger virtual SMP.

New solutions:

Large memory solution for big-data and analytics - vSMP
Foundation for Memory Expansion (MEX) is a cost and performance
optimized solution for users seeking to create very large memory VMs
from industry standard systems. vSMP Foundation for Memory Expansion
gives applications the ability to address all of the memory available
from multiple servers while running just one instance of the operating
system. Terabytes (TB) of memory can be easily accessed from a
collection of inexpensive servers. Its unique cost structure makes
this solution appealing for big-data, genomics and analytics customers.

Hosted VM mode - Version 5 of vSMP Foundation will run on top
of a virtual machine, in addition to physical servers. This allows
cloud customers to expand memory from one VM into another VM on a
different physical node. Hosted VM mode will initially support KVM
(Kernel Virtual Machine) and will be expanded to additional
hypervisors in the future.

Ethernet connectivity for Hosted VM mode - hosted VM mode
allows VMs to be created using standard Ethernet adapters. By
supporting Ethernet as a system interconnect for a virtualized
environment in addition to InfiniBand, vSMP Foundation can now run on
a cost-effective infrastructure, appealing to a more diverse set of
users and service providers.

Performance:

Batched I/O - vSMP Foundation 5 dramatically improves the
I/O performance by batching I/O operations between system boards and
executing scattered I/O commands in one transfer. I/O performance
improvement depends on the device type. Typical network speed
improvement could be up to 5x, and disk performance as much as 2x.

Provisioning:

IBM Platform HPC Integration - vSMP Foundation 5 has now been
integrated with IBM Platform HPC. This allows for organizations to
automate the workflow for a range of application requirements.
Applications that need the CPU or memory resources not immediately
available in a cluster at the time of job submission will now be able
to have IBM Platform HPC create virtual SMPs as needed, and release
the servers back to the cluster when the workload changes.

“vSMP Foundation 5 is a significant release from ScaleMP. We are
broadening our reach by extending both the infrastructure we work with
as well as our integration with workload management systems,” said Shai
Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “We are enabling very large memory
systems to be created, allowing for even more massive datasets to be
analyzed, through our expansion of capabilities. Big Data analytics will
benefit directly from the large memory offerings we are creating with
our partners.”

Pricing & Availability

vSMP Foundation 5 is offered under the ScaleMP licensing model with
prices starting as low as $400 per socket. The per-socket pricing model
allows for greater simplicity when it comes to selecting platforms for
vSMP Foundation. It provides customers peace of mind by focusing on the
virtual SMP size and capabilities rather than on the nodes size and
model. Additionally, vSMP Foundation is now available with floating
licenses, allowing customers to reuse the same license for future
hardware generations. Floating licenses provide the best ROI from vSMP
Foundation licenses. General availability of vSMP Foundation 5 is
expected in 1Q2013 and will be available for early access in December.
For more information about vSMP Foundation, please visit http://www.ScaleMP.com/products.

About vSMP Foundation

vSMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard off-the-shelf x86
servers into a single virtual high-end system. vSMP Foundation provides
customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical
multiprocessing (SMP) systems and also offers simplified clustering
infrastructure with a single operating system. It supports aggregation
of up to 128 servers into a single virtual SMP system, providing
customers with:

You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a w...

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations?...

The cloud era has reached the stage where it is no longer a question of whether a company should migrate, but when. Enterprises have embraced the outsourcing of where their various applications are stored and who manages them, saving significant investment along the way. Plus, the clou...

As DevOps methodologies expand their reach across the enterprise, organizations face the daunting challenge of adapting related cloud strategies to ensure optimal alignment, from managing complexity to ensuring proper governance. How can culture, automation, legacy apps and even budget...

While some developers care passionately about how data centers and clouds are architected, for most, it is only the end result that matters. To the majority of companies, technology exists to solve a business problem, and only delivers value when it is solving that problem. 2017 brings...

DevOps is under attack because developers don’t want to mess with infrastructure. They will happily own their code into production, but want to use platforms instead of raw automation. That’s changing the landscape that we understand as DevOps with both architecture concepts (CloudNati...